Movie Review: Angel-A

Luc Besson has made some pretty cool movies: The Fifth Element, The Professional, La Femme Nikita (I’m giving the American titles here). Until recently, I had not heard of his 2005 film Angel-A. It’s the story of a guy in deep debt to a bunch of rather nasty folks in Paris and who is at the end of his rope. Just as he’s about to end it all by diving off a bridge he turns to see a beautiful woman (Angela) about to do the same thing. She jumps, he dives in and saves her and then she spends the rest of the flick basically getting him to see how he has sold himself short all his life and to embrace who he is on the inside. Oh, and it’s billed as a comedy. I won’t reveal the ending nor the twist that you find out partway through (though it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out just from the description and title). What this movie does have going for it is that it is beautifully filmed in black and white, the pace is good and the lead actor playing Andre (the French-Moroccan actor Jamel Debbouzze) is great in this role. There is humour in the movie but it is certainly a dark comedy and only barely enters into that genre. I have to confess to laughing when Andre unsuccessfully asks to be arrested in order to have some time to think through his problems, even making the argument that it shouldn’t be too difficult given that he is an Arab with no identity papers. Overall, however, I have to say that the movie left me missing something. I’m not sure why but it never drew me in the way it needed to in order to work as a film. Maybe because it was too much of the classic adolescent fantasy of being saved by some mysterious beautiful women (see Weird Science for the American teenage comedy version of this…very different, but same basic premise in a lot of ways).  Still worth watching if you are a Luc Besson fan and, like I said, it is well-filmed, very stylish and Debbouzze’s performance is great.

Bottle Shock (movie review)

A couple of weeks ago CS and I took the afternoon off on a Wednesday. We were near 4th and Burrard, had some time to kill before meeting friends for dinner, and so decided to catch a matinee. Neither one of us had heard of the movie Bottle Shock, and so we took a gamble. Definitely a good move. Bottle Shock is based on the true story of a 1976 wine tasting in France. Not just any wine tasting, however. A blind wine tasting in which … Horror of Horrors!!! …. California wines beat out French wines! This is really a key event that set the wine world on its ear and fundamentally changed the nature of the industry. There’s a great scene in which Alan Rickman’s character, a British wine snob with a store in France and the mastermind behind the tasting, says very derisively that now we’ll be drinking wine from places like South America and Africa (I’m paraphrasing, but that was basically the point).

I understand if a few of you might think that this does not sound like makings of a great plot, let alone a great movie, but let me assure you that Bottle Shock is well worth seeing. It starts off a little slow in the first 15 minutes, but then you can really get into it. The cast is excellent, especially Rickman, the pace is perfect and the story is quite entertaining. It focuses on Rickman’s quest for California wines to include and the behind the scenes story of one winery (whose owner is played by Bill Pullman). There’s the requisite love interest, a bit of local flavor of Napa in the seventies (including the racism that exists against the latinos), and the standard humor of a fish out of water (Rickman is so very, very, very British plus he adds a little bit of French snobbery when it comes to wine). Overall, a wonderful little movie.

Move Review: The Painted Veil

I rented this movie on the recommendation of a colleague who said it was a well acted and well filmed movie with lots of nice shots of the Chinese countryside. All that is definitely true, but overall the movie was unfortunately quite mediocre. The Painted Veil (based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham) is the story of a British doctor in Shanghai in the 1920s (played by Edward Norton) and his wife (played by Naomi Watts), a rather spoiled upper-class woman. They barely know each other before marrying (each for their own reasons) and heading back to Dr. Fane’s posting in China. Kitty Fane is rather bored with the social life and overall life in colonial China and does not really love her husband. So, she takes up with the vice-consul (played by Liev Schreiber), believing that they love each other. Inevitably, her husband (Norton) finds out and drags her off to a remote area of China where there is a cholera epidemic. Of course, the rest is rather predictable. She grows as a person beyond her vain and shallow self, he rediscovers her love for her, she discovers love for him. There are the requisite bumps and tragedies along the way. All in all, as my colleague said, a well-acted and filmed movie. Of course, as is to be expected in such a film, China is merely a backdrop. it could just as easily been Africa, India, or any other colonial outpost. Sure, the cliches are kept to a minimum and there are some sympathetic (though very secondary) Chinese characters, but as with most Hollywood fare, the world out there is just a pretty backdrop to what happens to the white folks from here.

The Films of Richard Linklater

I belong to a video delivery service local to Vancouver (sorta like Netflix) and they’ve recently sent me a few Richard Linklater movies in a short period of time. I’d actually known about him for a while, but not seen his earlier movies. Since I really enjoyed A Scanner Darkly, I was looking forward to seeing his older work. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I was left somewhat unsatisfied. The four films were Tape, Waking Life, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. On one level they are quite different movies. However, in the end they are just vehicles for Linklater to muse out loud about various topics, mainly relationships in three flicks and a hodgepodge of ideas in Waking Life. That’s fine, I have no problem with that type of movie in general. However, while the films are well directed and well acted, I just felt that the dialogue was a little trite, unrealistic, and in some cases, not much more than what I would expect from a college pothead. I was just left wanting a little more. Of all the films, the one I liked the most was Tape, perhaps because I really enjoy the theatre and this one was so clearly adapted from a play (which I did not confirm until after seeing it). There are only three characters and one set (a motel room). Excellent performances from all three actors and a script that was less self-indulgent and more prone to creating tension than the other movies made it stand out among the four.

Movie Review: A Mighty Heart

I was a little skeptical about this movie when I rented it. The movie is the story of the disappearance and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl while he was trying to do a story on jihadists in Pakistan. It is told by depicting the search for him by his pregnant wife, Mariane (herself a journalist and pregnant at the time they were living in Pakistan), their friends, the US authorities and Pakistani anti-terror cops. It is also told through a series of flashbacks which serve to show the relationship between Daniel and Marianne, as well as some of the events leading up to his disappearance. Daniel, as is well known so this is by no means a spoiler, was eventually beheaded by his captors. There are a million ways this story could be told, ways that would fit into one or another view of the world, of islam, of geopolitics. Hence my skepticism and concern. In the end, I think that the movie is a very good one in the tone it takes (tough on terror without painting all muslims or all pakistanis as jihadists). It does not shy away from showing the struggles going on within Pakistan and its various government agencies. It is also well acted with Angelina Jolie doing a superb job as Mariane. A great supporting cast, particularly Irfan Khan as the counter-terrorism cop determined to find Pearl, always helps.